Oops

By sizemore Last edited 224 months ago
Oops
blame.jpg

Despite yesterday's round of headshaking regarding the idea that our involvement in Iraq may have provided just a little motivation for guys from Leeds to blow up parts of London, the New York Times is painting quite a different picture.

It seems that an assessment by the Joint Terrorist Analysis Centre given to British government agencies, foreign governments and corporations in mid-June was particularly surprising because it stated that terrorist-related activity in Britain was a direct result of violence in Iraq.

Blair and company just forgot to mention that then.

Events in Iraq are continuing to act as motivation and a focus of a range of terrorist related activity in the U.K

Maybe they forgot to highlight that part of the report with their official Downing Street magic markers.

Of course the problem with cherry-picking the parts of a threat assessment that you like the sound of can lead to the occasional gaffe. So when Blair and Co. (We keep wanting to type Legs Akimbo there for some reason) grinned at the following line from the same report:

at present there is not a group with both the current intent and the capability to attack the U.K

they immediately lowered our Terror Alert. And there it stayed right until the first bomb went off.

Now we don't expect our government to be able to predict this kind of thing, but wouldn't it be nice and make our leaders look a little more human and less like self serving twats if just ONCE they had the guts to say that maybe they made ONE mistake SOMEWHERE.

Note: The NY Times article quoted above is here (registration required), but has also been picked up on Reuters.

Last Updated 19 July 2005